Wife to Mr. Milton

by Robert Graves

  Mr. Christopher answered very smoothly: “Well, Brother, you may be right both in your politics and in your prognostication. But I, for one, cannot believe either that there will be found in England sufficient persons furious enough to take up arms against their King, on pretence of some ancient principle of liberty now overgrown with rank weeds and moss; or that you and I—for I am loyal to my King as the head of our Church and as our sovereign militant—shall ever find ourselves fratricidally opposed in battle, however warmly we may dispute in argument. Look out of your window, John, to-morrow when you arise, and watch the jolly people going to the market; and listen to the cheerful neighbourly greetings that pass between them, and then tell me whether a nation that looks so wholesome in the face can in any part be sick enough to run into civil war. Go to, John, you may rail and roar, but there is no more sign of war in England to-day than there is frost in my strawberry beds.”

  The rolling and jauncing of the coach over so many miles of hard road would have wearied me, even had the earlier part of my day been spent in an easy and careless manner; but now I was so worn out that, over-passing the stage of drowsiness, I was again wakeful, somewhat hysterical and with a headache that seemed like a sword thrust in behind my eyes.

  The bridal chamber was hung with garlands, and scented heavily with vervain and southernwood and with bowls of flowers—the damask-rose, the carnation, and the double-clove gillyflower—and there was a silver tray set beside the bed with a flagon of wine and glasses and a dish of little caraway cakes upon it, and the first nectarines and John apples of the year. The white satin coverlet was sprinkled with gold-dust, that glinted and winked in the light of seven fat wax candles set in a glassen candelabrum over the foot of the bed. Zara and Ann, who had slept in the coach, now performed their part of bridemaids, unlacing me and taking off my shoes and stockings and under-linen and leaving me naked at last between the fine linen sheets; after which they sang a little song and told my brother Richard, a brideman, to go call my husband in to me. Then they kissed me good night. There was nothing in Zara’s manner of which I could complain, for she stood in awe of my husband; and Ann was her own sweet, childish self.

  Then my husband came in, who locked the door; and, the shutters being already bolted, there we were alone together.

  When he had taken off his clothes he climbed into the bed with a Bible in his hand. He kissed me tenderly, and began to read me out a portion from the Canticles, where Solomon praises his mistress for her beauty, likening her belly to an heap of wheat, and her breasts to two young roes which are twins. Then he closed the book, after he had put a petal or two of the rose between the leaves, as a remembrance; and spoke very lover-like and sweetly to me, but in some foreign language, which sounded so uncouth that I believe it to have been the Syriac or the Aramaic. Then I must get out of bed again and kneel down beside him, and give thanks to God for his Infinite Bounty that he had created us male and female, with a deal more which I repeated after him. When our Amen was said he lifted me back again between the sheets and caught me in his arms and trembled with a strong passion. When I said nothing, but lay numb and stark, he raised my head, saying, “Ah, modest reluctancy—I admire you!” and presented a cup of wine to my lips. I sipped a little, but though I had resolved to please him, I could not catch the infection of his passion. He wooed me next with a pretty tale of his going to Italy in search of a bride: how one day while he was at Cambridge University he had walked out into the country beyond Grantchester, and being weary of much study had slept beneath a tree by the roadside. Passed two handsome young ladies in a coach, of whom one (the handsomer, as he learned afterwards from one who saw what was done) had fallen in love with him as he lay there. She wrote with a pencil on a little piece of paper, which she then thrust into his sleeping hand, a verse in the Italian language to the effect that if his closed eyes had slain her with their beauty, what would they not do when open? He could not by diligent inquiry discover who this lady was and had gone into Italy to seek her blindly. However, he had not found her there, and now being wed to me he regretted her not.

  How could I answer him but with “Oh” and “Ah” and “Hum”? As he spoke he toyed delicately with the ringlets of my hair.

  A great lassitude from the heavy fragrance of the herbs and flowers overcame me; and the wine sickened my stomach, and “Oh, Husband,” I cried, “my head splits! Will you not fetch me a little cool water on a handkerchief, from the bowl of flowers standing in the window, and tie it about my brow?”

  When a dog greyhound and a spaniel bitch once began coupling in the backside of our house at Forest Hill, Trunco caught them in the act and souse! she flung a pailful of cold water over them, which cooled the bitch’s rut in a trice; as for Jack the greyhound, he stood shivering in a foolish manner which made us all laugh, and then began to howl dolefully. It would be exceeding indecent to compare that event with this, yet my inopportune request for the moistened handkerchief was no less rude a shock to my husband’s nature than Trunco’s dousing had been to Jack and Blanche. He looked chapfallen and incredulous and knew not what to say. Presently, disengaging his arms from about my shoulders, he blurted out: “A headache! By the body of Bacchus and the sweet milk of Venus, only hearken now to this phlegmatic and ungrateful wretch! Where any other would almost have swooned with the luxury of being wooed with poetry and wine and prayer and the scent of roses and holy verbenas, and not in wanton disport but in the holy and legitimate bond of marriage—instead this miserable clod newls out that she has a headache and would have me lay a wetted rag upon her brow!”

  “I meant not to offend you, Husband,” said I faintly, “but if you had a headache to match mine I dare undertake that you would not be so poetical as this nor so impassionate. If you truly love me, as you say, you will give me what I ask.”

  He replied: “Nay, Child, I love you too well to indulge or yield to you even in so pelting a caprice as this. I am your husband, not your simpering gallant for whom disdainfully you drop a glove and expect that he will stoop to recover it; nay, nor any slobbering water-spaniel to whom you cry ‘go fetch, Sirrah!’ If you must have a moistened handkerchief for your brow, I give you leave to fetch it yourself!”

  I wept a little, but for pain and resentment, not for self-pity; then rising from the bed, and holding my head that throbbed like a drum, I went tottering to the window and dipped my fingers in the bowl of water, and dabbled my brow with it. Then I took up a silk neckerchief lying upon a table and was for using that as a bandage, when he roared at me not to handle his clothes; so I stumbled naked around the room, seeking a kerchief of my own. Yet since Trunco had not been suffered to come with me (who would have laid my necessaries neatly in a drawer for the night), I could find nothing, and came miserably back to bed.

  “I am not in general subject to the headache,” I said, wishing to placate my husband as he sat upright in the bed, glowering at me, “except when there is a storm brewing, or because of the flowers. To-night—”

  “The flowers!” he interrupted. “What a froward, drivelling flibbergib have I taken to my bosom? The night air is cool and mild, so that she dare not accuse the weather of causing her pretended headache; then must she complain of these perfect roses—blooms surpassing those of Rhodes and Sharon, and archaically consecrate to nuptial rites?”

  “Nay, Husband,” said I, holding my temples tight in my hands, “you misunderstand me. I spoke then of the flowers, meaning that the time of the month with me—”

  He leaped out of bed and cried: “Oh, heavens! Is it possible? Can she be so ignorant and sluttish or unthinking as to play this trick upon me? Wife, did your mother never tell you that these flowers defile a man, and that a husband must, by the Law of God, separate himself from his wife while they are upon her?”

  I protested: “Nay, they are not yet upon me; for all that I said was—”

  “I heard all what you said, you moon-heifer,” he answered roughly. “You know as well as I, or better, that the he
adache is the warning herald of your monthly sickness, and that therefore before morning, while I slept, I might have been defiled.”

  He was so petulant, impatient and thwart and my head ached so sorely that I could not venture upon a further explication; yet I meant to say no more than that the weather and the time of the month, were, in general, the causes of my headaches, but that to-night it was the rumbling and joggling of the coach that had caused it. Well, it was easier to let him believe for the present that he could not enjoy me because of the time of the month; and in the morning, I hoped, the headache would be gone and perhaps he would laugh with me at our cross-purposes when I told him my meaning. Meanwhile, he rolled out the truckle-bed from under the great bed and tossed a blanket or two upon it and bade me lie down there, which I did, while he lay propped on an elbow with his back turned to me and read a Greek book which he had with him. I complained that the candle-light hurt my eyes, but he paid no heed to my complaint and continued reading; so I drew a tress of my hair over, and presently fell asleep.

  Very early in the morning I was awakened by a sound which affrighted me, as of a man weeping. The candles were out and I could not recollect at first where I was. When it came back to me that this was my bridal night and that I was at Reading, between blankets on a truckle bed, with my husband above me, on my right hand, lying in a great bed under a coverlet sprinkled with gold-dust, and that it was he who wept, I knew not what to do. I was a little better of the headache, and that I had caused him such disappointment of his longings that he wept for frustration was painful to me; being tenderhearted, I would have done anything, almost, to assuage his misery.

  I asked in a low, whispering voice: “Husband, what ails you? Why do you weep? My head aches hardly at all now. May I come up to comfort you?”

  His sobbing ceased, but he returned me no answer. I repeated my question, a little louder, adding that I was sorry if I had vexed him by my stupidity.

  Again he did not answer, but I could hear him reach for a glass of wine and sip it slowly; by which I knew that he was wide awake, yet desired no conversation with me.

  I shrugged and, turning over, fell asleep again. I had a wild dream of the storming of a castle in Ireland, and especially I saw the lean, frightful faces of young Irish labourers as they fought upon a turret, armed with turfing spades, and were presently caught by the English pikemen and tumbled over the battlements. Mun’s face shone and vanished and shone again between clouds of smoke as the castle gate-house burned.

  ***

  When I awoke a few hours later my husband was gone from the chamber and Mrs. Thomasine Milton very kindly brought breakfast to me in bed, to spare me the shame of appearing before my family at the common board—a maid no longer, as she supposed. I observed that my husband had removed all his clothes and baggage from the room. I hoped to make my explications when he came back to the chamber to bid me good morning, and so spare him a gloomy day. But he did not come, though I lingered in the expectation that he would. Presently Zara ran in to tell me, with a giggling face, that the coach was ready; and when I came down my husband was already mounted. The explications must wait until nightfall.

  I climbed into the coach and drowsed in my seat for the greater part of the journey, but once or twice was called upon to thrust out my head to gaze at notable sights: such as Windsor Castle, with its round whitish towers, of which my husband told us he had written a couplet:

  Towers and battlements it sees

  Bosomed high in tufted trees,

  and amended it several times before it was perfect to his mind and ear.

  We passed through the thriving town of Brentford, where was one of the King’s richest manors, and the village of Turnham Green; and after we were come to Hammersmith there was a continuance of houses all the way on either side of the road, until our journey’s end. Here was Kensington, and leaving on our right hand St. James’s Palace with its broad acres of gardens, we drove down past Whitehall Palace and Charing Cross and along the Strand—all names famous to me, but the things themselves now seen for the first time—and so continued into the heart of London itself.

  Here there was such a hurly-burly, such cries, yells, screams, jostlings on the pavement, that I asked whether this were a market-day, or whether the people rioted. My mother laughed and told me that, the month being June, the Town was emptier than usual, for many persons of quality who had no business there had already gone out into the country with their servants to their summer houses. I had been often in Oxford and Thame, and once so far as Worcester to visit my mother’s kinsfolk at Honeybourne; but none of these places even on a market-day was ever so crowded as this, nor stank so ill. The profuse dung of horses on the cobbles, enough in a fifty yards’ stretch of street to have dressed a twenty-acre field, with cabbage stalks and peasecods and old rags and other filth of the gutters, smoking together all day under a hot sun, were enough to set my head whirling round again. Above all, a sort of sulphurous odour and a thick greasy, evil smoke spouted from the chimneys and puffed along the street; for in London, I found, they burned no wood hardly, but only sea-coal. To one who has not been born with that villainous smell in his nostrils it is a suffocation.

  “I wonder,” said I, “how anyone can live in this place without either going mad with the hubbub, or fainting with the stink from these gutters.”

  “You will soon grow habituated to the bustle of London,” said my mother, “and find country life stale and wearisome by comparison. To a true Bow-bell cockney, it is said, all is Barbary beyond Brentford, and Christendom ends at Greenwich. And, indeed, London is become the grand centre of this Universe, I believe, since Rome decayed—than which it is now double so numerous in citizens.”

  At this my husband acknowledged himself to have been born so close to Bow Church (at a house called the Spread Eagle in Bread Street) that had the belfry been struck by lightning the bells might well have dashed out his brains as he lay in his cradle.

  There was now a flashing of lanterns and torches, for the evening was cloudy, and the tall houses shut out what little light remained. The crowds were of such denseness that our horses could only advance at a walking pace; and once we were forced, by an obstruction to the train of vehicles of which our coaches formed a part, to halt for fully half an hour. As we waited, a band of about four hundred apprentices marched back from the ground where they had been at drill, carrying pikes with edges chalked against the rust; and then another band of about two hundred musketeers, whose song was The Bishops’ Last Good Night, with the refrain:

  “You are too saucy, Prelates! Come down, Prelates!”

  “The atheistical fly-blown dogs!” cried my mother, shaking her fist at them.

  I know not by which streets we rode, not then being so well acquainted with them as I now am, but I remember my first sight of St. Paul’s, rising up monstrous above us as we rode by. The steeple that had once reached no less than five hundred feet into the sky was now cropped by a good deal, the upper part having been broken by a great storm of wind and taken down for fear of worse things. At last, passing by the Church of St. Martin-le-Grand, we came to a great gate called Alder’s Gate, one of London’s seven, which has two square towers of four storeys in height, joined by a curtain of masonry set across the street.

  “It was by this gate that King Trouble first entered into London,” Mr. Milton cried in at the coach window. “See, there he glowers in judgment upon you!”

  We looked up and saw above us the shadowy form of a King seated on his throne. It was King James, who had ridden in by this gate when he came to take possession of the City, bringing with him the “Caledonian maggot of Divine Right,” as my husband called it.

  “He is bold enough, your husband,” said my mother to me, aside, “now that he is back home among his fellow Cockneys and eaters of buttered toast.”

  Then my husband asked her: “Madam, have you not heard what the learned Mr. Selden has said? How a King is a thing that men have made for their own sakes;
just as in a family one man is appointed to buy the meat?”

  We passed through the gate, and a few turns of the coach’s wheels brought us to an entry on the right-hand side of Aldersgate Street, which was long and straight and lined with spacious houses, uniformly built. At the entry we alighted from the coach and walked in, down an alley, and presently came to a pretty thatched house of ten rooms, plastered rose-white, having before it a garden with a lawn and an arbour of rose-bushes and a broad bed of white gilliflowers, and a young mulberry tree, and the leaden statue of a boy with a goose.

  “This is now your home, Mary,” cried my husband in a voice that showed he had come far towards forgiving me. “Here we may be at peace at last among my own possessions and people.” He added, whispering in my ear, “And now you may at last love me without strangeness or terror, submitting to me humbly, according to your vows before God.”

  For a moment I expected that he would catch me up in his arms, as was customary, and lift me across the threshold; but he refrained.

  The first to greet us was his father, John Milton the scrivener, a mild, sweet-natured, careful old man, who came out from the parlour having the bow of a viol in his hand. He had passed his eightieth year, yet was as brisk as many a man of fifty and could read small print without spectacles. He made much of me and called me a sweet child, and brought Ned and Johnny Phillips, his two grandchildren, to salute me. These were the children of his daughter Anne, who had married one Phillips, secretary to the Clerk of the Crown (an office of importance under the Lord Keeper), but, being left a widow, she had married Mr. Thomas Agar, her husband’s successor in this same office. My husband had now for two years been tutor to his two nephews, of whom Ned, the elder, was eleven years old and Johnny ten. They were grave, slender-limbed, timorous boys, as unlike those three sturdy boisterous comradoes, my brothers, John, William and Archdale, as herons are to hawks. They seemed to be in great awe of my husband. The only other person dwelling in the house was Jane Yates, my husband’s servant, a fiddle-faced, sour-looking virgin, very primly apparelled and five-and-forty years of age or thereabouts. Since there was not room in the house for all of us, it had been arranged that seven of my brothers and sisters, namely, all but little George and Bess and Betty,6 the three youngest, would lodge at the house of Mr. Abraham Blackborough, in the Lane of St. Martin’s-le-Grand near by. Mr. Blackborough was a collector of books and pamphlets, and related to my husband, though distantly.